SUPERMAN began his long screen career in 1941 — just three years after he soared aloft for his comic-book debut — with a series of elaborate and still-impressive animated shorts. All 17 episodes are included in “Max Fleischer’s Superman: 1941-1943,” out Tuesday, the first-ever stand-alone DVD release from the original masters owned by Warner Bros.

The title is a slight misnomer, because Fleischer — most famous for his Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons — only oversaw the first nine episodes, which his Fleischer Studios produced for its owner, Paramount Pictures.

At first, Fleischer wasn’t interested in producing what would later be regarded as the first dramatic cartoon shorts. Despite his invention of the Rotoscope, which allowed animators to trace live-action footage as a guide, the increased realism of the Superman characters would require him to re-train his artists.

So he told Paramount that the cartoons would require elaborate special effects. The price: a whopping $100,000 apiece ($1.4 million in today’s dollars), or about six times what the studio was paying for a Popeye clip.

The two parties settled on a still-hefty budget of $50,000 for the first installment, simply called “Superman,” which recounts the Man of Steel’s origins. The generous 10-minute running time for the Oscar-nominated short allowed Superman to battle a mad scientist (voiced by Jack “Popeye” Mercer) who tries to use an “electrothanasia ray” to destroy the Daily Planet’s city — which is identified not as Metropolis but Manhattan.

Superman and Clark Kent are voiced in the cartoons by Bud Collyer, who played the roles on the “Superman” radio show that debuted in 1940 and who is better known for later hosting “To Tell the Truth” on TV. Joan Alexander, also part of the radio cast, played Lois Lane.

The scripts are imaginative, the streamlined visuals bold and rooted in art deco. It’s easy to see how the early shorts, which are mostly sci-fi stories with titles such as “The Mechanical Monsters,” “The Arctic Giant” and “Electric Earthquake,” served as models for later live-action genre films.

The first nine were directed by Max’s brother Dave Fleischer, who left to join Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems after a disagreement with Max. Soon after, with Dave in breach of contract and Fleischer Studios deeply in debt, Paramount took over the operation, forced Max out and renamed it Famous Studios.

The remaining eight episodes were completed by Fleischer employees retained by Paramount — including Popeye directors Isadore Sparber, Dan Gordon and Seymour Kneitel (Fleischer’s son-in-law) — but the emphasis shifted largely to World War II stories, beginning with the politically incorrect “Japoteurs,” released in September 1942. Superman sinks a battleship in Yokohama in “Eleventh Hour,” but he occasionally escapes the war, as in one of the better late entries, the Egypt-set “The Mummy Strikes.”

The picture and sound quality in the Warner set, which retails for $27 and includes featurettes on the series as well as the history of Superman, is vastly superior to the public-domain collections of the Superman shorts that have circulated for many years.